Especially if you’re a member of Congress facing constituents who have started to shell out $4 a gallon for gas.

That may have been in the back – or front – of the minds of the 385 of 435 House members and 97 of 100 senators who voted last week to force President Bush to stop putting more fuel into the Strategic Petroleum Reserves.

You have to believe that as the price at the pump continued to climb, lawmakers, many of whom go home each weekend, weren’t all that keen about going home with nothing but an “I’m sorry” to offer their constituents. And for those who don’t return to their districts weekly, there’s a Memorial Day recess coming up when most will be back home for at least a week.

Bush strongly opposed what Congress did. But maybe looking at the veto-proof margins in both chambers, the president’s Energy Department on Friday announced that it was indeed suspending oil shipments into the Reserves beginning in July.

Now most experts don’t believe keeping the 70,000 gallons a day that normally go into the Reserves in the market for sale will suddenly make it a joy to go the gas station. They figure it will save about 2 to 5 cents a gallon. But at least lawmakers can say they’ve done something.

Four of Orange County’s House members voted for the bill – Reps. Ken Calvert, R-Corona; Gary Miller, R-Diamond Bar; Ed Royce, R-Fullerton and Loretta Sanchez, D-Garden Grove. Rep Dana Rohrabacher, R-Huntington Beach was en route to Washington when that vote was taken and his staff said he would have voted for it. Rep. John Campbell, R-Irvine, was one of 25 House members who said no.

Campbell said he did so because he didn’t believe it would have any effect at all on gas prices and could be a bad thing in the long run. Campbell told me that when this was done in the 1970s, oil went down $3 a barrel one day and went back up $4 a barrel the next.

You would think Campbell, who has one of the safest GOP seats in Congress, wouldn’t have much to worry about given his Newport Beach constituents. But he says even he is hearing about the high prices. Yet he believes he can explain to his folks that in the short term putting 70,000 more gallons a day into circulation won’t help much and that he is worried that it could jeopardize America’s ability to deal with shortages down the road.

That’s the theory behind these reserves in the first place, by the way. The were created in 1975 as a hedge against OPEC or other oil producing countries being able to cut off our supply of oil, like the Middle East group did during the 1973 and 1974 oil embargo.

Miller had his own reason for voting yes.

Good for you Democrats said Miller, with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek,

He said if diverting 70,000 gallons of oil reserves into the open market can make a difference, think of the impact the Democratic majority could have made if it voted with Republicans to allow exploration – aka drilling – in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve. ANWR, he said, could provide a million barrels a day and drop prices about 60 cents a gallon.

The Democrats aren’t buying that argument. In the Senate, they blocked an amendment calling for more domestic production. And House leaders wouldn’t let such a suggestion come up for a vote.

Sanchez defended her party’s resistance to drilling in ANWR, off the coast of California or other environmentally-sensitive places. It’s clear, she said, that the public isn’t interested in such drilling. What Americans are waiting for, Sanchez believes, is the kind of long term solution that doing something about climate change and finding alternate fuels will lead to.

Doing something about a problem that is up front for voters also was probably on the minds of presidential hopefuls John McCain and Hillary Rodham Clinton when they proposed to suspend collecting the 18-cents-per-gallon federal gas tax.

That idea, though, landed with a thud on Capitol Hill. Democratic leaders won’t bring it up, and n Not one economist stepped forward to say it would mean much. Another reason the Democratic leadership didn’t want to touch this idea, I suspect, is because Barack Obama – their likely standard bearer this fall – immediately pooh poohed it as being pandering to the voters.

Sanchez, a Clinton supporter, didn’t want to get into the fight over a gas tax. But she said one thing is for sure that if Congress went along with that idea she would want to slap a windfall profits tax on the oil companies so that the lost revenue from the tax would be made up from what she called the “killer profits” those companies are making.

But the reality is that a gas tax holiday isn’t likely to happen and, as oil closed at more than $126 a barrel on Friday, there wasn’t much relief in sight.